Classical philosophy and Darwinian biology are far more compatible than is usually assumed. In fact, looking at either from the standpoint of the other can enrich and deepen our appreciation of both. From a Darwinian point of view, the theories of Plato and Aristotle deserve to be taken very seriously. From the classical point of view, Darwinian biology is much less reductionist than its enemies suppose.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Culture is More Conservative Than Genes

One of the tacit assumptions
behind the academic resistance to evolutionary explanations of human behavior is that
culture is easier to change than genes.According to this assumption, if behavior X is largely or wholly
determined by culture then we can change it merely by reeducating people and by
modifying institutions.These are
presumed to be relatively easy.By
contrast, to the degree that behavior X is influence by genetic heritage, it
will be intractable.

I have long suspected that the
opposite might be the case.Genetic
influences are often highly responsive to environmental information.Figuring out how and why men are genetically
more disposed toward physical aggression might give us some valuable clues as
to how to deal with male aggression.On
the other hand, culture can be fiercely resistant to change.Cultural patterns, or memes, may offer fewer
levers for reform to pull and culture may develop precisely to resist both
natural and artificial challenges.

If folk tales simply spread by diffusion, like ink blots in
paper, one would expect to see smooth gradients in these variations as a
function of distance. Instead, researchers found that language differences
between cultures create significant barriers to that diffusion.

These barriers are stronger than those for the exchange of
genes — a message that might be crudely expressed as: “I’ll sleep with you, but
I prefer my stories to yours.”

This suggests that culture is
precisely resistant to the kind of diffusion that levels the genetic playing
field across human populations.

In the study, a team of researchers in Australia and New Zealand
used the statistical tools of population genetics to investigate variations in
‘The kind and the unkind girls’ across 31 European populations, such as
Armenian, Scottish, Basque and Icelandic groups.

“The geographic gradients we found are similar in scale to
what we see in genetics, suggesting that there may be parallel processes
responsible for mixing genetic and cultural information,” says lead author
Quentin Atkinson, who studies human evolution at the University of Auckland in
New Zealand.

“But the mechanisms aren’t identical,” Atkinson adds. “The
effect of ethnolinguistic boundaries is much stronger for the folk tales than
for genes.” This fits with recent studies looking at other aspects of culture,
such as song2. “Our findings support predictions that cultural variation should
be more pronounced between groups than genetic variation,” says Atkinson.

“This supports the view that our cultures act almost like
distinct biological species,” says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the
University of Reading, UK, who specializes in cultural transmission. “Our
cultural groups draw pretty tight boundaries around themselves and can absorb
genetic immigrants without absorbing their cultures.”

The implications of this may be
the reverse of the common assumptions.Genetic diffusion is, let us say, promiscuous.It is the basis of a general equality in
innate human capacities.Culture, by
contrast, creates some of the enormous differences that we observe between
different populations and nations.

It may be the case that any hope
for human progress depends largely on the degree to which human behavior is
influenced by biology rather than by culture.This is the opposite of what nearly everyone seems to believe.